Monday, July 15, 2013

Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi

By BEN HUBBARD and DAVID
D. KIRKPATRICK

New York Times, July 10, 2013

CAIRO — The streets seethe with
protests and government ministers are on the run or in jail, but since the
military ousted President Mohamed Morsi, life has somehow gotten better for
many people across Egypt:
Gas lines have disappeared, power cuts have stopped and the police have
returned to the street.

The apparently miraculous end to the crippling energy
shortages, and the re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions
of personnel left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in
2011 played a significant role — intentionally or not — in undermining the
overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Mr. Morsi.

And as the interim government struggles to unite a
divided nation, the Muslim Brotherhood and Mr. Morsi’s supporters say the
sudden turnaround proves that their opponents conspired to make Mr. Morsi fail.
Not only did police officers seem to disappear, but the state agencies
responsible for providing electricity and ensuring gas supplies failed so
fundamentally that gas lines and rolling blackouts fed widespread anger and
frustration.

“This was preparing for the coup,” said Naser el-Farash,
who served as the spokesman for the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade under
Mr. Morsi. “Different circles in the state, from the storage facilities to the
cars that transport petrol products to the gas stations, all participated in
creating the crisis.”

Working behind the scenes, members of the old
establishment, some of them close to Mr. Mubarak and the country’s top
generals, also helped finance, advise and organize those determined to topple
the Islamist leadership, including Naguib Sawiris, a billionaire and an
outspoken foe of the Brotherhood; Tahani El-Gebali, a former judge on the
Supreme Constitutional Court who is close to the ruling generals; and Shawki
al-Sayed, a legal adviser to Ahmed Shafik, Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister,
who lost the presidential race to Mr. Morsi.

But it is the police returning to the streets that offers
the most blatant sign that the institutions once loyal to Mr. Mubarak held back
while Mr. Morsi was in power. Throughout his one-year tenure, Mr. Morsi
struggled to appease the police, even alienating his own supporters rather than
trying to overhaul the Interior Ministry. But as crime increased and traffic
clogged roads — undermining not only the quality of life, but the economy — the
police refused to deploy fully.

Until now.

White-clad officers have returned to Cairo’s streets, and
security forces — widely despised before and after the revolution — intervened
with tear gas and shotguns against Islamists during widespread street clashes
last week, leading anti-Morsi rioters to laud them as heroes. Posters have gone
up around town showing a police officer surrounded by smiling children over the
words “Your security is our mission, your safety our goal.”

“You had officers and individuals who were working under
a specific policy that was against Islamic extremists and Islamists in
general,” said Ihab Youssef, a retired police officer who runs a professional
association for the security forces. “Then all of a sudden the regime flips and
there is an Islamic regime ruling. They could never psychologically accept
that.”

When Mr. Mubarak was removed after nearly 30 years in
office in 2011, the bureaucracy he built stayed largely in place. Many business
leaders, also a pillar of the old government, retained their wealth and
influence.

Despite coming to power through the freest elections in
Egyptian history, Mr. Morsi was unable to extend his authority over the
sprawling state apparatus, and his allies complained that what they called the
“deep state” was undermining their efforts at governing.

While he failed to broaden his appeal and build any kind
of national consensus, he also faced an active campaign by those hostile to his
leadership, including some of the wealthiest and most powerful pillars of the
Mubarak era.

Mr. Sawiris, one of Egypt’s richest men and a titan of
the old establishment, said Wednesday that he had supported an upstart group
called “tamarrod,” Arabic for “rebellion,” that led a petition drive seeking
Mr. Morsi’s ouster. He donated use of the nationwide offices and infrastructure
of the political party he built, the Free Egyptians. He provided publicity
through his popular television network and his major interest in Egypt’s
largest private newspaper. He even commissioned the production of a popular
music video that played heavily on his network.

“Tamarrod did not even know it was me!” he said. “I am
not ashamed of it.”

He said he had publicly predicted that ousting Mr. Morsi
would bolster Egypt’s sputtering economy because it would bring in billions of
dollars in aid from oil-rich monarchies afraid that the Islamist movement might
spread to their shores. By Wednesday, a total of $12 billion had flowed in from
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. “That will take us for 12
months with no problem,” Mr. Sawiris said.

Ms. Gebali, the former judge, said in a telephone
interview on Wednesday that she and other legal experts helped tamarrod create
its strategy to appeal directly to the military to oust Mr. Morsi and pass the
interim presidency to the chief of the constitutional court.

“We saw that there was movement and popular creativity,
so we wanted to see if it would have an effect and a constitutional basis,” Ms.
Gebali said.

Mr. Farash, the trade ministry spokesman under Mr. Morsi,
attributed the fuel shortages to black marketers linked to Mr. Mubarak, who
diverted shipments of state-subsidized fuel to sell for a profit abroad.
Corrupt officials torpedoed Mr. Morsi’s introduction of a smart card system to
track fuel shipments by refusing to use the devices, he said.

But not everyone agreed with that interpretation, as
supporters of the interim government said the improvements in recent days were
a reflection of Mr. Morsi’s incompetence, not a conspiracy. State news media
said energy shortages occurred because consumers bought extra fuel out of fear,
which appeared to evaporate after Mr. Morsi’s fall. On Wednesday, Al Ahram, the
flagship newspaper, said the energy grid had had a surplus in the past week for
the first time in months, thanks to “energy-saving measures by the public.”

“I feel like Egypt is back,” Ayman Abdel-Hakam, a
criminal court judge from a Cairo suburb, said after waiting only a few minutes
to fill up his car at a downtown gas station. He accused Mr. Morsi and the
Muslim Brotherhood of trying to seize all state power and accused them of
creating the fuel crisis by exporting gasoline to Hamas, the militant Islamic
group in the Gaza Strip.

“We had a disease, and we got rid of it,” Mr. Abdel-Hakam
said.

Ahmed Nabawi, a gas station manager, said he had heard
several reasons for the gas crisis: technical glitches at a storage facility, a
shipment of low-quality gas from abroad and unnecessary stockpiling by the
public. Still, he was amazed at how quickly the crisis disappeared.

“We went to sleep one night, woke up the next day, and
the crisis was gone,” he said, casually sipping tea in his office with his
colleagues.

Regardless of the reasons behind the crisis, he said, Mr.
Morsi’s rule had not helped.

“No one wanted to cooperate with his people because they
didn’t accept him,” he said. “Now that he is gone, they are working like
they’re supposed to.”